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Thursday, November 16, 2017

Adventures in “Survey Adjacent” Music History Courses

By John Spilker

At the 2017 Teaching Music History Conference, colleagues
discussed two potential trends in teaching music history courses: a
content-oriented music history survey approach and a methods-oriented
musicology approach. A colleague asked how I would describe “Music History:
Gender & Sexuality” and “Music History: The Environment.” I responded that
these two required music history courses at Nebraska Wesleyan University are
“survey adjacent” and we shared a laugh at this new terminology. I teach
topic-based music history courses structured around a limited number of case
studies and my pedagogy lies in between the content vs. methods poles described
above. My students dig deep with the
intentionally selective content to develop research and writing skills, which
they apply to a semester-long research project that culminates in a
thesis-driven paper on any topic of their choice, including music outside the
Western art music tradition. This approach is definitely a very different place
from when I first started teaching the music history survey in 2007. In fact, I
would have never imagined participating in such a strange new pedagogical
landscape ten years ago. For example, as an especially fastidious and
overly-conscientious teacher of the traditional music history survey, I
assigned the textbook reading and three anthology pieces (early, middle, and
late exemplars) for the single 50-minute class period on the Renaissance
madrigal. (It’s precious to look back at this.) Some colleagues would point
out, “They’re never going to do all that work for one class period.”
Nevertheless, I persisted…for a while.

Initial Reconsiderations

After having taught the music history survey for two years,
I used Kay Kaufmann Shelemay’s Soundscapes to teach
my first world music course during the 2010–2011 academic year. I wondered,
“what if music history courses were structured using a case-study approach
similar to Shelemay’s textbook?” With fondness, I recalled Douglass Seaton’s
approach to the Classical and Romantic period courses I took in graduate school.
Each class session focused on a single piece and an article connected to the
composition and/or genre. During the 2011–2012 academic year, my first semester
teaching at Nebraska Wesleyan University, the exiting seniors suggested it
would be much more helpful to learn music research methods during their
sophomore and/or junior years. They noted that other majors had anywhere from
one to three research methods courses as part of the curriculum. I wondered,
“Why do we wait until a senior seminar or graduate bibliography course to teach
research methods to music students? Furthermore, why is the approach usually so
musicology-centric?” (Consequently, a new book
offers a more comprehensive approach to music research methods.) During my three
years of experience teaching the survey, I noticed that student papers often
lacked a clear thesis and thorough engagement with
scholarly books and articles. Some students didn’t know how to find a topic
beyond “The History of the Trombone” or “Beethoven’s Symphonies.” Then it hit
me: we guide students through an encyclopedic textbook and anthology about the
chronology of compositional newness; then tell them to do research with
secondary sources and write a paper. Often, there is scant instruction or
hands-on workshop time spent on how to read and analyze articles, gather and
organize data, formulate a thesis, construct a narrative, and revise
prose…largely because “there’s no time” when you feel compelled to cover so
much content. Furthermore, students may not want to research and write about
art music from the time periods encapsulated by the survey course because it
doesn’t seem readily relevant to their professional goals.

Skills and Topics: Lessons Learned from the Liberal
Education Curriculum

I learned how to use less content to help incoming students
develop skills in analytical reading, research, and writing as part of
professional development activities for NWU’s first-semester seminar. In The Courage to Teach,
Parker Palmer discusses “Teaching from the Microcosm” as a way to engage
students in the practices of the field, rather than merely covering
disciplinary content. I struggled with the idea of cutting content to build in
time for developing intellectual skills (e.g. research, writing, public
speaking, etc.). How could I possibly let go of all this good information that
the students need to know? A religion colleague shared a perspective that
changed her outlook about coverage and curriculum design: “I don’t need to
educate my students as if I’m training my replacement.”

As NWU worked to create a new liberal education curriculum,
we discussed the idea of scaffolding skills across the curriculum. Accordingly,
both of my music history courses are upper-level writing instructive. Music
History: Gender & Sexuality is diversity instructive. George Kuh identifies
writing and diversity as high-impact
educational practices. The integrative core of our new curriculum requires
students to take courses in “threads,” cohorts of courses from various
departments organized around a single topic or issue. A senior music colleague
inquired, “could you re-design your music history courses so they will simultaneously
satisfy the requirements for specific threads?” He likely expected a
surface-level fulfillment; however, musicology has been moving in the direction
of engaging deeply with interdisciplinary topics like, ecomusicology. I could
offer music history courses that connect with concepts from environmental and
gender studies, while remaining connected to the context of the music history
survey by constructing each course from case-studies. Furthermore, a
topic-based case-study approach freed me to select repertoire that represents
the diversity of music that extends beyond “art music,” which is laden with issues of race and socio-economic status.
My new courses include blues, hip-hop,
pop music, Broadway musical theater, film music, monophonic secular song, the
madrigal, opera, and varied 20th-century art-music genres, some of which
reference genres from earlier time periods such as the mass, symphony, and
piano character piece.

The Case Study

For my new courses, each case study typically focuses on a
single musical work and a related piece of scholarship. Each case study
comprises two to three seventy-minute class sessions, during which students develop
musicological research skills associated with historical social/cultural
context, stylistic analysis, and current scholarship. Students apply these
skills by completing required reading, listening, watching and/or analysis before
class, engaging in activities and discussion during class, and working on the
scaffolded research and writing assignments that culminate in their research
paper. The case study on Edgard Varèse’s Déserts from “Music History: The
Environment” illustrates the construction of a single case study. First, the
“historical social/cultural context” class session addresses information about
the historical period, genre, performance practice, intellectual history, and
developments across disciplines including music. Students are assigned to read
“Prelude to the Twentieth Century” from Mark Evan Bonds’s textbook
and “Second Half of the 20th-century” from Douglass Seaton’s text.
Students also research information about Transatlantic U.S. modernism, experimental
music, and electronic music. Second, for the “stylistic analysis”
class session, students have access to the score and a recording of the work.
They guide their listening and score study by taking notes on salient features
of each element of music: scoring, dynamics, rhythm, melody, harmony, texture,
and form. Third, the “current scholarship” class session requires students to
understand, analyze, and critique the content, research methods, and writing
found in a scholarly publication. For the Déserts case study, students prepare
notes on Denise Von Glahn’s essay “‘Empty Spaces’: On the Conceptual Origins of
Déserts” in Edgard
Varèse.

“Survey Adjacent” (Don’t worry. I’ve got your back.)

Although NASM accreditation guidelines do not require
coverage of the six historical periods, both of my new music history courses
provide students with a foundation rooted in the music history survey. “Music
History: Gender and Sexuality” includes concepts and genres from the Medieval,
Renaissance, and Baroque periods and “Music History: The Environment” addresses
the Classic period through the present. This information complements content from
other required music courses ranging from theory to ensembles and applied
lessons. It also provides a helpful frame of reference for students who need to
prepare independently for graduate school entrance exams or the Praxis II exam
for music education certification. For these students, process remains
paramount: they need to apply their research skills to approach the task of
studying for a comprehensive exam. One colleague, who teaches graduate students
at a R1 institution, helped me see the big picture as I swirled in insecurity
and self-doubt about doing something new: “Your new courses are actually
preparing students for the things they will need to do in graduate school, not
just exposing them to the information that could appear on the
music history entrance exam.” At the end of the day, my courses use
discipline-specific content to help students build the skills they need to
excel in any career and lifelong-learning endeavors, whether or not grad school
beckons. After all, even I can say to my students that my current job routinely
requires me to do many things that I never learned as a part of my degree
coursework, pedagogy being chief among those.

***

John D. Spilker holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from The
Florida State University and is Associate Professor of Musicology and Gender
Studies at Nebraska Wesleyan University. He serves as the co-coordinator for
the campus-wide liberal education assessment initiative, a project sponsored by
the Higher Learning Commission’s Assessment Academy. He has received the United Methodist Church Exemplary Teacher Award (2014-2015), NWU Faculty Advocate for Diversity Award (2017), and
the Margaret J. Prouty Teaching Award (2016-2017). At
the 2016 national meeting of the Association of American Colleges and
Universities, Dr. Spilker presented his work on music history curricular
revision and integration with NWU’s new liberal education program. He has
presented his scholarship on writing pedagogy, care pedagogy, and alternative
approaches to the music history survey at national meetings of the American
Musicological Society. His research on dissonant counterpoint and Henry Cowell
has been published in American Music and the Journal of the
Society for American Music.